打喷嚏时应该捂住口鼻，但不是用手Sneeze Into Your Elbow, Not Your Hand. Please.

来源：纽约时报 2018-04-04 06:01

When you feel a sneeze or a cough coming on, covering your mouth prevents the spread of infectious germs. You probably knew that.

当你感觉快要打喷嚏或咳嗽的时候，要捂住嘴巴防止传染性细菌的传播。这一点你可能知道。

But the way you cover up also matters, and there are plenty of people who haven’t yet heard the consensus guidance of health officials: If no tissue is available, you should aim into your elbow, not your hand. Even if that means breaking a long-held habit.

“If somebody sneezes into their hands, that creates an opportunity for those germs to be passed on to other people, or contaminate other objects that people touch,” said Dr. Vincent Hill, chief of the waterborne disease prevention branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“如果往手心里打喷嚏，就使得细菌有机会传播给其他人，或是污染这个人碰过的其他物品，”疾病控制和预防中心(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)水传播疾病预防小组的负责人文森特·希尔博士(Dr. Vincent Hill)说。

Germs are most commonly spread by the respiratory droplets emitted from sneezing and coughing. When they land on your hands, they’re transmitted to things like door knobs, elevator buttons and other surfaces the people around you are likely to also touch.

This isn’t just us nagging. Sneezing and coughing into your arm has become the standard suggestion of not just the C.D.C., but also organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Public Health Association. Even the New York City subway system occasionally runs an announcement asking riders to “cough or sneeze into the bend of your arm or use a tissue.”

You or your co-workers might be forgiven for not knowing that, since the suggestion is relatively new. The C.D.C. guidance has become official only in the last 10 to 15 years, Dr. Hill said.

这个提议相对较新，你和同事们对此并不了解也情有可原。希尔表示，疾病控制和预防中心的指南在最近的10到15年内才成为官方指导。

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said he began seeing the suggestion more prominently about 10 years ago.

美国公共卫生协会执行主任乔治·本杰明(Georges Benjamin)博士表示，大约在10年前他才开始更加重视这些建议。

That means that adults may have missed the advice. Children, however, are frequently taught in school the proper way to cough or sneeze — sometimes referred to as the Dracula cough, since it makes you look like the count covering up with his cape.

Mary Anne Jackson, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine, said the term “cough etiquette” first turned up in 2000, and she traced the suggestion to sneeze into your arm to 2003, when SARS fears were widespread. It gained further prominence in 2009, when the H1N1 swine flu pandemic struck the United States.

That year, Kathleen Sebelius, then the health and human services secretary, shamed Chuck Todd, an NBC journalist, for his sneezing etiquette at a White House press briefing. (Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host, later dismissed her advice as coming from “elitist snobs.”)